Effect of Simulator Motion on Pilot Behavior and Perception

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

A set of experiments were conducted on the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies flight research simulator to determine the effects of translational and yaw motion on pilot performance, workload, fidelity, pilot compensation, and motion perception for three helicopter yaw control tasks. The three control tasks were a yaw capture, a disturbance rejection task, and a tracking task. The yaw capture experiment was a duplication of an experiment previously run at a different simulator facility. The results of the yaw capture task were in general agreement with the previous study with the exception that, in the current study, yaw motion had a larger impact on pilot performance than the previous study. The current study found that translational motion improves performance and increases fidelity for all three tasks. Yaw motion increased performance for the yaw capture and disturbance rejection tasks. Translational motion generally improved fidelity and was easier to detect than yaw motion for all three tasks. Finally, if translational motion was present, the addition of yaw motion usually provided little additional benefit to performance, workload, compensation, or fidelity for all three tasks.